DESCRECIMIENTO: RED MUNDIAL: DECISIONES EN CANMASDEU

Adjunto las decisiones de los grupos que estudiaron la posibilidad de crear una Red Mundial o Internacional de Descrecimiento, reunidos en la comunidad okupa, Canmasdeu, a las afueras de Barcelona, despúes de la 2a. Conferencia Internacional sobre Decrecimiento Económico del 26-29 de marzo. Les ruego enviarme sus comentarios, para enviarlos a los organizadores de la red. Saludos

--
Miguel Valencia
ECOMUNIDADES
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Tuesday 30 March, Barcelona

 

 

I. The Identity of the Degrowth Network

Basic shared ideas developed by participants.

 

The network would be based on degrowth both as a slogan and as a process.

 

Degrowth  involves producing and consuming less. It calls for social justice: for more equality between genders, cultures, colour, North/South, generations. In this respect there should be clear limits to inequality and upper and lower limits to property, income and power.

 

Degrowth is based on a diveristy of principles, including :

-         Conviviality/buen vivir (or "Sumak Kawsay" in Kichua)

-         Open localism: reduction of distances instead of creation of borders, connection with diversity within all locality

-         Voluntary simplicity

-         Non violence

-         Deep democracy (inclusive, radical, direct, participative)

 

The degrowth process seeks socially, ecologically, economically responsible, safe and soft transition and transformation looking both at short and long term (example can be the ban the use of private cars in urban areas).

 

See Paris and the Barcelona declarations.

 

 

II. The Objectives of the Degrowth Network

 

General remarks:

 

The dynamics of modern civilisation are threatening social and natural means. The objective of the network is to bring forward a cultural change and to strengthen degrowth throughout the world.

 

It is about:

 

Strengthening/Supporting

1. local fights (where mutual strengthening, without patron-client relationship, is promoted)
2. exemplary positive examples
3. research/theory
4. the connection/the dialogue between society and research

 

Promoting dialogue and making connections (not only in the web, also REAL)

 

1.     within the degrowth-community, people with similar circumstances/concerns

      => share, cooperate, support

 

2.     between people/organisations with different concerns/circumstances (for example activists and scientists, civil society and grass roots movements...)

      => it is important to accept the difference and to „identify in difference", this is what makes us strong

 

How to achieve this?

·         Visiting other groups/networks (with bicycle, collective transport, walking).....=> Share food, experiences...

·         Collective actions (for example picnic day, critical mass...)

·         Web

·         Conferences

·         Translate Articles/books

 

Sharing

1. experiences
2. documents
3. news
4. information about events

 

Education and expansion

In order to reach more people/initiatives we need Education means

 

OPEN QUESTIONS

1.     It was unclear how political parties have to been seen? On a local/regional level it seemes to be important, but on national level it is at least „difficult".

2.     The point came up, whether a degrowth-network exits allready: A degrowth network already exists, and this is made of the people and links created around the two conferences on degrowth.  There have been other attempts for creating an international network after the social forum in Malmo. www.degrowth.net/wiki

Also a website for international networking has been created after a French meeting:

http://www.r-m-o-c.net (Global Network for Growth objection)

 

 

III. Organization of the specific Network

 

Maintain the DIVERSITY of NETWORKS

§  Geographically

§  Thematically – researchers, civil society, practitioners

 

2 WAYS of organizing

 

VIRTUALLY

 

Website as a hub of network (Bob as facilitator?)

§  Mapping of groups/subjects, a gateway of networks

§  Entrance to groups' websites

§  Billboard for news/agenda

§  Multi-lingual and simple

? Secretariat on rotating principle or a committee of each group

§  Facilitator needed +National representation

Groups are sent invitation to join. They join if they endorse the "identity".

Groups should link their website with the international one.

Sorting by group/region and by profile/topic

 

FACE TO FACE

 

(Bi)annual meetings

Conferences, forums, events

Be present in other forums to meet other networks

Self-organised

 

Principles

·         Funding obtained from sustainable/"good" organisations only

• No centralised funding for building international network, but funding on a co-operative basis
• Good to have a physical place to meet, i.e. for local or national
• Democratic organisation to choose international events
• International network should be approved by a wider assembly

 

 

IV.  Project proposals of the network

 

 

Organizing Degrowth related Events:

 

§  Multiplication of conference / workshops / public debates / summer school at local level

§  Organize one common action, the same day, in many different cities (E.g. Global Pic-Nic for degrowth on the 6^th of June)

§  Organize marche or caravan to strengthen local groups & dynamics

§  Organize more degrowth cultural events (film, music, etc)

§  Create a fund for the next international conference to invite more people with no resources to travel

 

Strengthen the advocacy work:

 

§  Create a working group to assess all local degrowth groups' assets & see how they can help each other.

§  Map the potentials allies  at national level & international level: politicians, journalists, NGOs, trade unions, etc

§  Contact potentially interested civil society groups at national level : Collective buying  vegetables groups (AMAP, GAS, etc), Local exchange Trading Systems (LETs), cohousing/ecovillages networks, Green activists groups, Esperanto,...

 

 

Communication ideas:

 

§  Create a didactic kit – educational manual for teachers

§  Create a web based info page on how to facilitate degrowth workshops

§  Create a list of all the degrowth related radio programmes at the national levels >> 24h international degrowth radio show

§  Write & Translate degrowth textbooks

 

 

V. Website related to the network

 

Group 1

Flip Chart sheet

§  Multilingual/Translation - very important

§  Tools

1.     Email, forums, lists, blogs, video

2.     Group planning (Doodle, Skype, Surveys)

3.     Webinars

§  Issue: how to filter / reduce email volume

 

Bob's detailed notes

§  should be multilingual, many languages

§  translations should be possible

§  tools: blogs, twitter, lists, viral video, email, web pages, facebook, interactive (learning tools, games)

§  meeting planning and preparation (doodle, survey monkey, skype conerence calls)

§  how to manage the volume of email

1.     filters,

§  web site should have areas for events, documents

1.     a newsletter or index every 15 days to summarize what's been posted

2.     make it easier to organize by having criteria for information synthesis

1.     e,g, for events: when, where, what; for docs: author, keywords, data. language

2.     e.g. translate only the subject line and first paragraph of each email

3.     have fields for time, date, location of events

4.     have contact names for contacts about the article/event

5.     use forums for posting or sharing

§  Needs to be lite (i.e. or people will hold back in a big or heavy theme group

§  Where to find volunteer translators

1.     get translation school professors to assign degrowth network documents for translation for free

2.     use Babblefish/Systran for computer translations (only good for a few keywords and not for whole pages)

§  See Friiends of the Earth International site as an example

 

Group Two

Flip Chart sheet

§  Defining the web before defining the network is like putting the cart before the horse

§  Web site should be a space to share events, documents, experiences

§  The design should be simple and based on open source software and principles

§  Who decides what gets posted?

§  There should be country/language nodes and one central node

 

Bob's detailed notes

§  the web site should reflect the network, i.e. diversity (language,cultures, countries)

§  each node should be responsible for their national/language content

§  a place to share info re events, documents, experiences

§  but who decides what gets posted, or what gets put at the top of a page and therefore gets "priority" attention

§  too many things posted means nothing gets read

§  lots can be done without the web

§  India: The web is a supplement, face to face content is more important, web is for public documents and we don't track what gets read

§  we need to define the network before designing a web site (otherwise it's the cart before the horse)

§  we need to be aware that single key nodes in the internet "cloud" network of computer servers can close off traffic, threatening freedom of exchange of information

§  use direct FTP file transfers rather than HTTP

§  we need a simple site with simple tools

§  we should use open system software, e.g. Open Office

§  in addition to areas for events, documents and experiences, there should be one over bulletin board

 

 

Group Three

Flip Chart sheet

-         The web site should be a space for sharing of information about

-         Events, Documents, Experience, Contacts, Reading lists, Bibliographies

-         What is the potential for parallel physical spaces as well

-         Research, facilitation, training, resources for applied simplicity

-         Internet Radio

-         Set up criteria for keywords and fields for information (e.g. where, when, what for events)

-         Information should be based on action – not empty shells

-         Global and/or local

-         There should be a capacity to search for information by country/theme, etc.

 

Bob's detailed notes

§  we want a place to see what's going on or what they're doing and how to reach them

§  if it's not theirs, they won't visit the site; if they don't help build the system, they won't participate

§  a place to share information about actions, a calendar

§  a contacts database – key words, assets

§  a document library

§  reading lists, bibliographies (+ thesaurus/glossary)

§  ability to search by country, by theme

§  Group one proposed "structured" input fields

§  see the Barcelona Catalan degrowth web site as an example

1.     20 theme areas, not much used but a nice design

§  a good design can reduce operational costs

§  how about a map to display node content

§  how to use/facilitate contacts, network people assets

§  could we set up an internet radio service? Podcasts?

§  Streaming conference content, video

§  What about physical hubs, local centres which could act as points of information, research, info on how to live simply, etc.

 

Group 4 recommended an area for debates in addition to for events, documents and sharing experiences

They also looked at two basic initial web page designs, one circular and one linear. See the attached photo.

 

Group 5 suggested an area for sharing of information about rights violations (land invasions, mining disruptions, pollution, etc.) should be there too – i.e. denuncias – perhaps a blog could help with this. The three "projects" that they recommended were: 1) write a web site project proposal and seek comments on it; 2) commision a web site design; and 3) raise funds for the project. One person, on the yellow card for the "third" action noted that "crowd sourcing" was a potential for mechanism for fundraising.

 

 

 

 

Propuesta sober Medios Masivos y Descrecimeinto y ante el KLIMAFORUM10

Serge Latouche, en sus conferencias en México, inisitió en que existen tres armas de destrucción masiva en el sistema moderno de crecimiento económico:

 

1.- La mercadotecnia y la publicidad: que colonizan nuestras mentes con imágenes de poder, supremacía, seguridad, superación, prestigio social, envidiadas por todos, obtenidos por el consumo de ciertos productos o servicios.

 

2.- El Credito, que nos permite conseguir lo que todos envidian, pero, que nos somete a un permanente endeudamiento que nos obliga a trabajar cada día mas y mas y estar mas exclevizados por el sistema

 

3.- La Obsolescencia Planeada que hace que los productos industriales duren poco tiempo y sean irreparables, por lo que debemos frecuentemente conseguir el nuevo modelo Made in China que durará menos que el anterior.   

(Miguel Valencia)

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Medios masivos, consumismo, alienación: ecocidio y suicidio

José Arias Chávez                                                                             Mayo de 2010

 

En el mundo enajenado de la sociedad de consumo, se acepta generalmente un papel indispensable a la inducción del consumo de bienes y servicios y con ello al crecimiento de la economía. Por el otro lado, quienes somos críticos e impugnadores incansables del injusto, equívoco y nefasto sistema que rige al mundo, le asignamos el papel de uno de los peores villanos de nuestro tiempo al que hoy juegan los medios masivos de "comunicación", entre los que, además de los clásicos como la escuela, los libros, la prensa escrita y el cine, destacan los electrónicos: la radio y la televisión. Los que distinguimos por contraste a otros de tipo colectivo, que no tienen por característica y objetivo masificar las conductas, las ideas y la conciencia, y que por el contrario, permiten, fomentan y suscitan la auténtica comunicación igualitaria, horizontal y por ello, democrática: los medios alternativos. Generadores de una genuina comunicación humana están, aparte de una superviviente buena prensa, las radios comunitarias, la auténtica radio pública no gubernamental, y en gran medida lo va ya siendo el Internet.

 

 La mercadotecnia y la publicidad son la base conceptual y los medios masivos son efectivamente el medio, la herramienta con que el economicismo rampante que mueve al mundo desde hace siglo y medio, ha creado el fetiche de que el progreso, el desarrollo, el bienestar y hasta la felicidad, requieren que se haga crecer sin tregua a la economía, en una espiral infinita sin más límites que la explotación desenfrenada de los "recursos", de unas naciones por otras, de unas sociedades por otras y de unos individuos que expolian y oprimen a los otros.

 

Pero hoy, cuando habemos muchos que cuestionamos esa falacia tan largamente tragada por la opinión pública e impulsada por los sumos sacerdotes beneficiarios y testaferros de los dueños del sistema: los grandes consorcios y los poderosos económica o políticamente, sabemos que son ellos los que están destruyendo a la Naturaleza, a la sociedad, al ser humano y a las demás especies vivientes, sólo para engrosar sus alforjas de dinero, avaricia y poder.

 

Queremos llamar la atención sobre esta terrible complicidad, sobre esta perversidad hipócrita de los medios masivos y que hasta nos los endosan como una muestra de la democracia, la apertura y la modernidad de las que debemos enorgullecernos, cuando resultan una sangrienta arma de destrucción masiva, ya sea de los ecosistemas, de las culturas, del equilibro climático y ambiental, de la salud física, mental y espiritual. Reconozcamos en ellos a uno de los peores enemigos del planeta, de la Naturaleza y de la humanidad, sus culturas y auténticos valores y en fin, de la Historia.

 

Y que no nos salgan sus voceros fariseos con que son "un factor indispensable" del verdadero progreso, ni del auténtico avance humano, ni del genuino modo en que la humanidad, reconciliada con la Naturaleza y consigo misma, logre vivir en armonía con el futuro. Porque no servirán para un legítimo desarrollo de lo más valioso del ser humano, para una real mejor calidad de vida, que no se base en la injusticia o el daño a otros humanos, ni a los otros seres vivos que nos sustentan.  

 

Que quede claro: los llamados medios masivos muy poco o nada tienen que ver con la auténtica y entrañable comunicación humana, a la que le hace falta, una vez liberada de la nefasta estructura y poderes fácticos de los 'mass media', constituir, formar y ensanchar una comunicación humana colectiva e individual, valiosa en sí misma.

 

BP And The 'Little Eichmanns'

BP And The 'Little Eichmanns'

By Chris Hedges

May 17, 2010 " TruthDig"  

 

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

 

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume''-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

 

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge. 

 

"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." "No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."

 

Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force-a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."

 

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.

 

Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society."

 

"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity 'man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."

The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.

 

America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down with us.

 

"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the 'end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress." "Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it-not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds." 

 

The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno

 

Mesa Cambio Climático UACM

 

PARA CONOCER QUE PAISES SE HAN ADHERIDO AL ACUERDO DE COPENHAGUE

PARA CONOCER QUE PAISES SE HAN ADHERIDO AL ACUERDO DE COPENHAGUE

 

-- http://www.usclimatenetwork.org/policy/copenhagen-accord-commitments --

 

 

El tambien llamado Acuerdo de Crapenhague, impulsado por Obama, al final de la COP-15, ahora firmado por Mexico y muchos otros países

 

 

--
Miguel Valencia
ECOMUNIDADES

 

CONFERENCIA DEL DR. HOWARD EHRMAN: ENERGÍA, CRISIS Y CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO

Este lunes 24 de mayo, nos visitará el Dr. Howard Ehrman, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor de la University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) del College of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine y del School of Public Health, Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences.

 

Howard participó en Cochabamaba con los representantes del Klimaforum10 en diversas reuniones de la Cumbre de los Pueblos y compartió con nosotros varias experiencias en Bolivia, incluyendo nuestro ascenso a una de las montañas del parque Tunari y la visita al Chapare. Se encuentra muy involucrado en la lucha social y ambiental en Chicago, junto con redes afro y latinoamericanas. Es parte de la red internacional Climate Justice Now! . Habla bien el español, pues tiene viejas ligas con México.

 

Howard participará en la conferencia ENERGÍA, CRISIS Y CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO que tendrá lugar el lunes 24 de mayo, a partir de las 17.00 hrs, en la Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, plantel colonia del Valle, San Lorenzo 278, en la que también participaránn: René Torres Bejarano del IPN; José Arias de la UACM y Miguel Valencia del Klimaforum10.

 

Además, tendrá una reunión con los compañeros del Klimaforum10, antes de la conferencia en la Universidad: lugar y hora por confirmar.

 

Los invitamos a conocer a un luchador social tan comprometido y experimentado como Howard.

 

Saludos

 

 

 

Miguel Valencia
ECOMUNIDADES